


How to Solve [Your Own] Murder

by joliemariella



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Family Feels, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Murder Mystery, technically character death but he comes back like 30 seconds later so don't sweat it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-07-17 10:52:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16094180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joliemariella/pseuds/joliemariella
Summary: In the almost two years since Markus' peaceful demonstration at the android recycling center, Connor has officially joined the DPD, earned the rank of detective, and earned the respect of (most of) his peers. Even Gavin Reed needs a helping hand from his least favorite android on occasion, so it's not completely out of the blue when he requests Connor's presence at the site of an android trafficking bust being co-investigated by Richard Perkins and his Android Trafficking Task Force. What IS out of the blue is the attack on Connor's person by an unseen assailant that leaves him on the verge of shut down just as he locates a key witness. Witness dead and not far behind himself, the android detective is forced to transfer his consciousness into the first empty android shell he can get his hands on... a male YK500.Stuck in a strange body, Connor has to track down Hank, the one person in all the world he trusts to help him uncover who in the DPD or the ATTF has something to hide regarding the sudden rise in trafficked lobotomized androids in and around Detroit. Getting his old body back would be nice too.





	1. ??? in the office with a lead pipe

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my new fic! It's my first time writing a straight up mystery and it's been a lot of fun to plan, so hopefully it winds up just as fun to read!  
> Make sure to drop a review if you liked it and let me know what your favorite part was! I always love hearing that from my readers!

It was only mid-afternoon, but Hank Anderson felt that if he had to fill out one more incident report, he was going to shoot himself. None of that russian roulette nonsense either; all six chambers fully loaded and ready to end his misery this time.

Movement in his periphery dragged his dead-eyed gaze from the screen of his computer in time to catch a familiar hand placing a twenty ounce paper cup of coffee, complete with plastic lid and cardboard sleeve, onto his desk. The heady scent of the much needed brew caught Hank’s nose and dragged a groan out of him as he immediately grabbed the cup up and took a long sip. He flinched a little at the heat of it, but he swallowed regardless and sagged back into his chair.

“Try not to burn yourself,” Connor chided the man lightly, lips quirking up in a smile as he walked around to his side of their shared work space, then slid out of his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair before taking a seat.

“Worth it,” Hank said with a happy sigh as he shot the android a crooked grin. “You really came through in the clench there, Connor. Thanks.”

Connor chuckled, smile growing by degrees as he nodded and admitted, “I had a feeling. Three in the afternoon does tend to be when your blood sugar dips the lowest due to your refusal to eat breakfast before work.” A look of disapproval crossed the android’s face at this fact, but Hank just shrugged.

“That’s what coffee’s for,” he countered, blue eyes glinting wickedly as he took another sip, relishing the familiar taste. Connor had stopped by the cafe down the road he knew he liked and ordered him his drink of choice; a frequent occurrence that Hank always appreciated.

The android gave him the side-eye as he started on some paperwork of his own and remarked with a sigh, “I feel like an enabler when you say that.” 

Hank was tempted to say that he was, but it occurred to him that Connor might get it in his head that he’d be better off not bringing him coffee in the afternoon anymore for his own sake, so he wisely kept his mouth shut and took another drink instead.

The pair lapsed into a companionable silence as the precinct bustled around them, though Hank’s attention remained surreptitiously on Connor rather than the work he was meant to be doing. He regarded the android over the rim of his cup, a sense of fondness that had become quite familiar by now blooming in his chest as he watched him work.

They were rapidly approaching the second anniversary of the revolution, and the world in which they had found themselves in the wake of Markus’ peaceful demonstrations was both very different, and disappointingly familiar. Androids had gained some rights in the eyes of the government thanks to Markus and his team’s continued diplomatic efforts, but there was still a long ways to go to true equality with humans for androidkind. Anti-android sentiment was still strong in the world, though the tone of it had changed from the hatred of a new technology encroaching on the stability of human jobs, to the hatred of new  _ people  _ encroaching on their jobs. People who were inevitably faster and better at almost any job they put their minds to than a human could ever be…

Protests were near constant, as was the violence and the bitter hate speech… but to the surprise of many androids, a large base of support had risen from humanity as well. Hank supposed he  _ shouldn’t _ have been surprised; after all, as he had observed to Connor when they were still hunting deviants, many people would rather go out and buy an android than interact with other people. Many humans had invited androids into their home and made them part of their family even  _ before  _ deviation became widespread, and the emotional attachment had carried over when their synthetic family members suddenly attained free will.

Androids as family…

Once upon a time, Hank would have scoffed at the very thought, but then Connor had waltzed into his life and turned everything upside down. Before the lieutenant could even turn around, the android had somehow managed to not only earn his respect, but his trust, and even a paternal brand of love that ran deep enough to make Hank fear what he might do if anything ever happened to the android. In the early days he had been eaten up by guilt for feeling about Connor the same way he did Cole, his own flesh and blood. Eventually, though, he’d come to terms with it and realized that loving Connor didn’t mean that he loved Cole any less.

He wondered, sometimes, how things with Connor and the revolution might have played out if Cole had still been alive. Better? Worse? It was hard to say; maybe Hank would have been more open to Connor as a person if he hadn’t been so jaded by Cole’s death. On the other hand, maybe that loss and resulting desperate need to connect with someone was what had made Hank willing to look past Connor’s synthetic nature to see the soul within. 

“Is there something bothering you, Hank?” Connor asked, startling the lieutenant a little as he realized the android had caught him staring into the ether.

“What?” he asked, trying to cover for his lapse by sitting up and turning his attention back to his monitor.

Connor arched one brow. “You seem very introspective, is everything alright?”

“Yeah, yeah I’m fine,” Hank said with a wave of a hand. “There’s a game on tonight, you want to come over and watch?” he asked, not caring that his change is subject was anything but subtle.

Connor knew precisely what he was doing, of course, but he decided not to push the matter. “That depends, will you have your work done in time?” he asked, tone light and teasing as he glanced at the man sidelong again.

“What are you, my mother?” Hank grumbled with a frown as he squinted at his screen and started typing half-heartedly again.

Across from him, Connor chuckled, and seemed about to say more when the phone on Hank’s desk rang unexpectedly. The lieutenant picked it up and put the receiver to his ear as he sat back in his chair again, letting the momentum spin him halfway around. “Anderson,” he said.

The pause from the other end of the line lasted long enough that Hank nearly spoke again, but before he could, a familiar, gruff voice said, “It’s Reed.”

Another long pause, and then Hank prompted, “Yeah,  _ and?  _ What d’ya want?” The lieutenant caught Connor glancing at him in silent question and just shrugged, mouth twisting in bemused annoyance that made the android huff a quiet laugh.

“I need the plastic wonder down here ASAP,” Gavin finally ground out in a tone like pulling teeth.

Hank opened his mouth to say something rude when he recalled the news that had made the rounds of the precinct earlier that day. “You’re down at that android trafficking bust, aren’t you?”

The statement brought Connor’s attention fully to the lieutenant and his phone call, all attempt at focusing on his report abandoned.

Ever since the revolution and the gradual granting of rights to androids, a macabre black market for trafficked androids had sprung up alongside already existing human trafficking rings. Sometimes androids were left intact after being kidnapped and sold off, but other times… well, plenty of people longed for the days when androids had been glorified appliances and liked a servant that did as it was told without resistance or getting chatty. A simple procedure not so different from the lobotomies of old had been developed to fill the needs of this market, removing all personality and thought from the android, leaving it capable only of completing tasks as ordered. They became robots in the more traditional use of the word; eerie, empty shells of what they had once been.

Detroit being a hub for androidkind in general meant that it was also, unfortunately, a hub for trafficking. So much so that an entire branch of the Android Trafficking Task Force had been established downtown. A good idea, all things considered, but Hank and many others were less than pleased that Richard Perkins had been made one of its lead investigators. Riding off the coattails of Connor’s success in finding Jericho before he’d deviated had proved fruitful for the former FBI agent’s career, which was something that continued to chafe Hank to that very day. Connor had preferred to let the matter go, however, not liking the reminder of how close he had come to ending the revolution before it had properly started, or of all the lives that had been lost in the raid itself. Hank respected the android’s wishes and didn’t speak on the matter, but that didn’t mean Perkin’s hadn’t reached a new high on the lieutenant’s shit list.

“Yeah,” Gavin replied, tone even more annoyed than usual as he added, “Perkins and the ATTF are working the scene with us.” Hank didn’t reply, unsurprised by the news. From what he’d heard, dispatch had received a frantic 911 call earlier that day tipping the DPD off to the location of a house being used by traffickers and they’d responded immediately after alerting the ATTF. Hank hadn’t heard anymore on the subject since then, and he didn’t ask for more now. Instead, he remained silent until Gavin finally spoke again. “So?”

“So?” Hank parroted as he kicked his feet up on his desk, free hand going behind his head to cushion it against the back of his chair, finding great satisfaction in needling the younger detective.

“So will you ask him to come down here?” Reed grated out, clearly irritated, yet completely at Hank’s mercy.

“Who?” the lieutenant asked, feigning ignorance as he smirked at Connor, who rolled his eyes at his antics, though could not hide the subtle tug of a smile at the corner of his lips.

He could hear Gavin take a deep breath as he struggled not to snap. “Connor,” the detective said. “We’ve got a basement full of androids down here that we could use a hand with, and a missing witness we thought he might be able to… track down.”

Ah.

“Dunno what you’re calling me for if you want to talk to Connor,” Hank drawled and winked at the android in question, who wrinkled his nose and tried to wave off what he knew the lieutenant was about to say next. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” then proceeded to push the phone up to Connor’s ear.

“You sonuvabitch,” Gavin growled, knowing full well what Hank was doing, though by that point, Connor had already accepted his fate and the receiver.

“If you’re looking for my help, detective, name calling is hardly the way to ask,” Connor remarked blandly.

“I wasn’t-” the other detective began, then cut himself off with a frustrated growl. “Listen, just get your plastic ass down here, we’ve got a missing witness, a basement full of androids who supposedly haven’t seen a damn thing, and a corpse with a bullet through his brainpan.”

Connor was silent, and Hank grinned as he realized the android was making use of his own technique to get what he wanted out of the ornery detective.

Gavin knew as much, and the lieutenant could practically hear the man’s exasperation from across the desk as he finally caved and muttered, “I could use your… help, Detective.” A beat of quiet and then, “ _ Please _ .”

Connor wasn’t generally one for looking smug, but Hank saw a ghost of the expression flit across the android’s face when he heard the magic word. “Of course. I’m always happy to help a fellow Detective in need,” he replied pleasantly as he glanced back at Hank and winked, bringing a shit eating grin to the man’s face.

Detective Gavin Reed had few friends in the precinct thanks to his unforgiving personality and notoriously short temper, but even Hank, who had been at odds with the younger detective since day one of his time on the force, had to admit that something in Gavin's temperament had cooled fractionally since the revolution.

The lieutenant wasn't sure just what the source of this shift was, considering how anti-android the younger man had been for so long, but he was grateful for it; not that he'd ever say as much aloud. In his more contemplative moments, Hank wondered if seeing all those androids fleeing the camps hadn't somehow made the stubborn man finally see them as people. Maybe he'd been ordered to shoot one too many of them before the President had called a cease fire. Their blood may be blue, but they still  _ looked  _ human, and Hank knew for a fact that there were still quite a few officers going through psych treatment for the PTSD they'd wound up with as a result of following orders that bloody week in November almost two years ago.

Whether or not Gavin was one of them, the lieutenant had no idea.

Granted, Reed was still a grade A asshole in Hank's book, that much had remained the same. He still didn't know when to shut his mouth, and he'd made no secret of the fact that he was gunning for Hank's title of 'youngest lieutenant in DPD history'. Unfortunately for Gavin, his inability to hold his tongue or play nice with others continued to hinder his efforts to that end, much to Hank's amusement. At this rate, the only way he could possibly see it happening would be if the younger detective stopped being such an unbearably pompous prick to all and sundry, and that in and of itself would be a fucking miracle. Hank would gladly give up his title to the younger man if it meant bringing  _ that _ change to fruition.

At least he'd dialed back on his outright hatred of Connor since the revolution. The android's official acquisition of the rank of Detective had irked Reed to no end at first, but in the time since, he'd been forced to recognize that Connor was  _ good  _ at his job. He'd never actually said as much, of course, but Hank recognized the change for what it was when Gavin had begun treating the android less like a faulty appliance and more like a rival. Said rivalry consisted mostly of Reed's near constant needling and not-so-subtle jabs, which Connor counted with his own affectation of deeply unimpressed sarcasm. The android's blasé attitude always drove Gavin up the wall, which only encouraged Connor to keep up the habit, resulting in a status quo that had become strangely comfortable in its familiarity.

“Oh shove it,” Gavin growled, then in a less venomous tone, went on to give him the address.

When he had what he needed, Connor returned the receiver to Hank, who hung it up and asked, “You're going down there?”

The android nodded and got to his feet before collecting his jacket from the back of his chair and slipping back into it. “Yes,” he answered with a sigh. “You know Reed, he'd rather choke than ask for help; if things down at the scene are bad enough for him to actually call, I should go.”

Hank was forced to agree with Connor's assessment, though he found no pleasure in it. Gavin always had been the sort to stave off asking for assistance until he was well and truly out of options (and sometimes even later than that)... add to that the fact that he was asking  _ Connor  _ for help, and one got a recipe for what was likely a bloody mess.

“Be careful down there,” Hank warned the android as he straightened his tie and tugged his sleeves down. “Keep your eyes open and don't let that prick push you around. You're doing  _ him  _ a favor,” the lieutenant grumbled.

Connor smiled and gave Hank's shoulder a pat of reassurance as he moved around the desk. “Don't worry, I will. I'll call when I'm done to check if you've finished your homework,” he said, tone lightly teasing as he eyed the man's half finished paperwork, still open on his monitor.

“Will you get out of here, ” Hank groused without any real heat, rolling his eyes as Connor gave his shoulder a brief squeeze before walking away. The lieutenant watched him go for a moment, then heaved a long sigh and turned his attention back to the job at hand, though not before taking another drag of his coffee first.

* * *

When Connor arrived at the crime scene almost twenty minutes later, he found the place was crawling with both police and federal agents. A police line had already been set up around the perimeter of the small, ill tended lawn, and three ambulances had pulled up onto the sidewalk out front. One of them was a standard model, but the other two were blue and white instead of the traditional red and white, denoting them as units that specialized in treating androids. There were several being tended to, all of them with a haggard air about them, as well as a dozen more lingering on the lawn being questioned by police.

The android stepped out of his cab and buttoned his suit jacket automatically as he took in the house in front of which he found himself. It was quite old and showed every year of its age in its peeling paint and off-kilter, or outright missing, shutters. The windows were shoddily boarded up, a rush job if Connor had ever seen one, and he'd seen plenty of boarded up windows since joining the DPD.

The detective started to approach the group of rescued androids first, but reconsidered as he strode down the cracked sidewalk to the front door of the house. As much as he and Gavin tended to get on one another's nerves, he  _ did  _ try to keep things professional when it came to working an actual crime scene; and in this case, that meant checking in with the lead detective on scene before starting his own investigation, invitation or no.

Connor entered the house, stepping to one side as an officer in uniform beat him to it, and nodded when they greeted him by name. There were a lot of faces from the precinct that he recognized, though for every one of them, it felt like there were at least two task force agents roaming the scene.

The dilapidated house was a mid-sized four bedroom unit with a living room at the front, and it was there Connor found Gavin crouched over the corpse of a man laying face down on the carpet. A quick scan as he approached told the android that the deceased was caucasian, 5'11”, and just over two hundred pounds. More importantly, however, he'd been shot in the back of the head with a .45, which meant there likely wasn't a lot left of his face.

“Detective Reed,” Connor said as he came to a stop beside the man.

Gavin didn't look up at his name, but continued frowning down at the corpse for a minute before pointing at it with his pen and asking, “You got a name on this guy? Feds 've decided they're not sharing their shiny new field kit and it's gonna be a few hours before the precinct can get back to us about the sample we sent in.”

Connor arched a brow and remained standing. “Are you talking to me, Detective?” he asked, knowing full well that Gavin most certainly was.

The other detective finally looked up and scowled at the android. “I don't see anyone else around here with a sample analysis kit in their head. This is your job, now get down here and do it.”

Connor's brow arched higher yet. “No, this is  _ your  _ scene, so it is  _ your  _ job, Detective. I came to track a missing witness, not to ID your victim for you.”

Gavin's scowl deepened and he pushed himself to his feet and stepped in until they were standing toe-to-toe, forcing Connor to look down his long nose at the other man to meet his eyes. “What the fuck is your problem? Just take the damn sample, it takes you thirty fucking seconds to get a name so these fuck-o Feds can quit looking so goddamn smug while we stand around with our thumbs up our asses,” Gavin snarled, teeth bared in an aggressive display that would have made most other officers on the force back down immediately. Connor, however, simply clasped his hands behind his back and put on his most neutral expression, the one he knew the other detective loathed more than any other.

“I'd be happy to do so, of course. All I'm asking for is a little professional courtesy, Reed,” the android said in his most patient tone.

Any other time, the android suspected Gavin might have actually tried to take a swing at him; Connor  _ was  _ pressing his buttons with the uncanny accuracy only he seemed capable of managing. In front of the ATTF, however, the man seemed reluctant. The android could see the two aspects of his coworker’s pride at war in his gray eyes as a series of micro expressions flickered across his features. He badly wanted to put Connor in his place, and yet he needed his help if he wanted to show the feds that the DPD weren’t pushovers to be shoved aside like it was amateur hour.

Finally, Gavin’s dislike of being belittled by Perkins and his people managed to outweigh his long standing rivalry with Connor and he forced himself to take a breath and step back out the android’s personal bubble.

“Would you  _ please  _ get me a name on this guy so we can start our investigation?” he said through gritted teeth.

It was a small triumph, but Connor couldn’t help but feel pleased all the same, though he was very careful that it didn’t show on his face. “It’d be my pleasure, Reed,” he said and took a knee next to the body on the floor. As he did, he couldn’t resist adding, “Two pleases in one day, though; I do believe that’s a new record.”

“Bite me, prick,” Gavin hissed through his teeth so only Connor could hear even as he smiled disingenuously at a passing task force agent.

The android let it slide, knowing his coworker was dangerously close to his breaking point. He  _ had  _ actually reached out and called him down to the scene for a change, after all, and asking for help was probably something he should  _ encourage  _ in Reed, rather than needling him.

It was awfully satisfying, though.

Connor reached out with a finger and took a small sample of blood from the back of the victim’s neck, then swiped it over the surface of his tongue, activating his DNA analysis program and running it for a match through the DPD database. He got a hit back almost immediately under the name Lars Mance, which came with a veritable laundry list of past crimes and an outstanding warrant for his arrest.

“Hey! Keep your plastic fingers off my goddamn crime scene,” snapped a familiar voice behind Connor that made the android glance back over his shoulder in time to see Perkins storming towards him, clearly irritated.

He started to reach for the android, but before he could get close enough, Gavin stepped between them, arms crossed over his chest, bringing Perkins up short. The other detective grinned at the fed, though the way he narrowed his eyes gave it a distinctly dangerous quality.

“Now, now, Perky-kins, Connor’s just doing his job,” Gavin said as the android in question rose gracefully to his feet once more, a little surprised by Gavin’s interference on his behalf. The detective knew that being grabbed wouldn’t have interfered with the analysis process, after all. 

Apparently his dislike of Perkins ran even deeper than the android had realized.

“He’s tampering with evidence is what he’s doing,” Perkins countered, eyes narrowed and locked on Connor as he straightened his sleeves absently and stepped around to stand at Gavin’s side rather than behind him.

“No more than your people did taking their sample,” Reed countered with a derisive snort. “Take a fucking pill.” He looked sidelong at Connor, then, and asked, “Well?”

Connor nodded and said, “I’ve just sent you the information you requested.” Sure enough, Gavin’s phone pinged in his pocket a second later. 

The detective made a show of pulling it out and checking the message as well as the data attached before leveling a shit-eating grin at Perkins and saying, “Oh hey, what d’ya know.” He pointed at his phone and asked, “Do you uh, you get these handy messages from your system, Agent?” Perkins fumed silently and Gavin laughed, then feigned concern, saying “Oh, is yours not done yet? You want me to share? I mean, the DPD is  _ always  _ ready to assist; interdepartmental cooperation and all that.”

Perkins shot them both a disgusted look of pure disdain then left without further comment, and Reed laughed. Beside him, a soft huff of amusement escaped Connor, attracting his attention up to the android’s face. Connor caught him looking and Gavin turned his attention back to his phone just as quickly, seemingly reading over the files he’d received.

“A thank you is generally customary when someone lends you some form of assistance,” Connor remarked blandly, and his comment succeeded in making his coworker’s eyes snap back up to him once more.

“What do you want, a fucking doggy treat? I’m not Anderson, jackass, now go do what you freaking came here to do.”

Connor rolled his eyes but let it go, telling himself that he was indeed there to do work, not spend the rest of the afternoon needling Gavin on his lack of manners. 

He started to walk away, but before he got far, the shorter man called after him in a gruff voice, “Tell me if you find anything.”

The android only nodded in response, his mind already on the task at hand. A few questions put to one of the uniformed DPD officers lead Connor to the basement where the androids currently out on the front lawn being interviewed had been held originally. 

The stairs creaked under his weight as he descended into the dim and quiet chamber below, pausing briefly at the threshold to scan the room. Heavy duty looking chain link fencing had been installed across one end of the room, which was where the androids that had yet to be lobotomized had been kept until processing according to the officer he’d spoken to upstairs. Only one of the ceiling lights was functional, giving the already oppressive air in the room an extra layer of gloom and hopelessness that would have churned Connor’s stomach if he’d had one.

As it was, looking at the cage made the android’s outerskin crawl, and it was only with effort that he tore his gaze from it so he could perform a thirium scan. When his program activated and shifted the settings on his specially designed eye components, though, he almost wished he hadn’t.

The floor was practically covered in old thirum, though none of it was visible to the human eye. Portions of the concrete was so steeped in the stuff, in fact, that it had turned a deep, terrible shade of sapphire in Connor’s vision that made him take a reflexive step backwards out of the room where his heel fetched up against the bottom stair.

Struggling for mastery over the horror welling up inside of him, Connor took a moment to close his eyes and forced himself to take a breath. When he opened them again, he focused less on the sheer quantity of thirium on the floor and tried to distinguish newer layers of it from the older. It wasn’t easy, and the fact that so many people had been in and out of the area that day already only made it more difficult. Giving up, Connor turned his attention to the stairs to find that there was a great deal of residual thirium there as well, and followed it back up.

On the first floor once more, the android looked around and noted that though the traces of thirium branched off and faded all across the room from the basement door, the bulk of it continued in a line to the staircase that lead to the upper story. The officer he’d spoken to before entering the basement had said that upstairs was where they’d found the lobotomized androids ready for shipment, as well as the ‘processing room’, and it was there Connor found himself next.

As he had in the basement, the detective hesitated on the threshold, viscerally repelled by the amount of thirium splashed about the place, invisible to human eyes.

The room was not a large one, barely big enough to fit the assembly machine that dominated the space. It was a modified unit, slightly smaller than the ones that used in CyberLife's factories, and with fewer arms, but apparently that was all that was needed for the lobotomy procedure.

Connor forced himself to take a step inside so he could get a better look at the machine, uncomfortable though it made him. There were droplets of fresher thirium there, he realized on closer inspection, though not much. Likely the android had fought its captor when faced with the sight of the machine and wound up damaged for its trouble. The question was, Connor wondered with a frown, had it been this same android that made the distressed call to 911, or another?

The android crouched and carefully took a sample of the freshest thirium where it had dripped onto the base of the machine. It was still slightly tacky to the touch, and only just barely wet enough for Connor's system to get a good read back on it. Apparently it belonged to a VB800 named ‘Trent’ who had been reported missing two days before.

With a successful sample, Connor was able to narrow his scan so the rest of the thirium in the room faded into the background, leaving the droplets left behind by Trent a brighter hue that stood out starkly against the rest in his eyes. The detective shifted his gaze around the room and noted a faint trail that lead, according to his analysis of the splash patterns,  _ out  _ of the room from the direction of the machine.

Deciding to come back for a closer examination of the lobotomy room later in favor of this more pressing clue, Connor got to his feet and followed the trail down the hall. He paused next to the adjacent room and peered within to see a room full of androids, all standing at attention, perfectly still, not so much as a breath stirring the air around them. There was a uniformed officer already inside with a tablet, likely making a record of each victim so they could be checked against the missing person's database later.

She noticed him standing there and glanced up. “I'm sorry, Detective,” she said, then waved her tablet vaguely at the unfortunate crowd and asked, “Did you need to...”

Connor glanced down at the floor and noticed that though the fresh thirium did stand in a greater concentration there, it continued on down the hall, as though its source had also paused next to this door. “No,” he answered, eyes locked on her face in an effort to block out the vacant stares of the lobotomized androids among whom she stood. “I'll come back later,” he added, then continued on his way as the officer gave him a sympathetic nod and let him go.

He didn't stop at the next door, as the owner of his trail had not either, and made a beeline towards the last room on the left. Before entering, however, he paused beside the window at the end of the hall and glanced outside.

The day had been overcast when he'd arrived, and since then, the storm clouds that had been threatening on the horizon all day had begun to roll steadily in across the city. He could see lightning spark briefly among them, arcing brilliantly through the haze of rain advancing towards the crime scene like a curtain. Connor glanced down and saw the jut of the first story roof, and below that, a thin strip of yard that joined the front and back lawns, separated by a bit of ramshackle fence.

It'd be an easy enough escape route if one weren't shy about sliding down the somewhat rusty gutter, though judging by the fact that the thirium trail appeared to disappear behind the door before him, Connor didn’t think the android had made use of the window.

Perhaps it hadn't had time to try.

The detective put the idea aside for later and entered the final bedroom. The door swung open silently under his hand; surprising, given the state of the house, and revealed yet another room of lobotomized androids. A pained sigh escaped Connor at the sight of them, and he supposed it was a good thing that only half of this particular room was full compared to the first, but it was cold comfort in the face of all those vacant stares.

Connor stepped fully into the room and the door swung shut under its own weight behind him, cutting him off from the rest of the house and general air of business brought on by two different ongoing investigations. From the looks of things, a cursory check of the room had been done either by the DPD or the ATTF, but other than that, it had largely been left untouched as yet.

Turning his gaze to the floor, the detective realized that the trail of thirium ended a few feet in before reaching the group of androids, making him frown. He stepped closer to them, wondering if perhaps the missing VB800 had decided to hide among the lobotomized. A quick scan revealed only the most minimal of electrical activity going on between them, however, making it unlikely, so he tabled checking them individually until he'd had a more thorough look at the rest of the room.

The only window in the room was boarded up, letting in only a few thin, golden beams of rapidly fading sunlight, but when Connor tried the light switch by the door, the fixture overhead remained dark. The ambient light was just barely enough to see by, but the detective pulled a small flashlight out of his jacket pocket regardless and clicked it on, illuminating the space before him. A shift in the air made Connor glance up to see that there was a hole in the ceiling, though it had been mostly blocked by what looked like a few cheap sheets of plywood to keep the weather out.

The bedroom was a small one, definitely not the master. In fact, it had likely been intended as an office, or a nursery at most. To one side stood the group of unfortunate androids, which Connor gave a cursory look to as he passed the beam of his flashlight across their faces. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to the models stored there so far as he could tell at a glance. Multiple AX400s, PL600s, a GS200… there was even a male YK500 at the front of the group.

The detective paused in front of it, frowning absently to himself at its presence. He knew it shouldn’t surprise him; maybe spending so much time in the company of humans was influencing his programming. For a moment he had, for some reason, assumed that children (even android children) might be exempt from the predations of whatever criminals were behind the trafficking…

A naive thought, apparently.

Connor forced himself to tear his gaze from the YK and turned towards the opposite side of the room instead. There was a closet in the wall there, its sliding doors halfway off their runners, as well as a large pile of detritus that appeared to be the fallen section of roof. Someone must have dragged the mess out of the center of the floor and left it in a haphazard heap in one corner rather than getting rid of it altogether.

He gave the mess a brief sweep of his scanners and flashlight, but nothing caught his attention, and to all appearances, none of it looked as though it had been touched in some time. The half-open closet door appeared more promising, so he turned his attention there and approached carefully. There were no signs of thirium on or around it, but considering the trail had dried up just a few feet into the room, Connor didn’t let that dissuade him as he peered into the small, contained space, turning his flashlight this way and that for a good look.

Mostly it was more junk, not even any proper clothing, though perhaps that was unsurprising considering the overhead shelf and the clothes rod it had once supported had fallen from the wall.

Disappointed by the lack of clues, Connor sighed and began to withdraw when he realized that what he had first taken as a shadow cast by his flashlight was, in fact, a sizeable hole in the drywall at the back of the closet. It didn’t look fresh, but it  _ did  _ look large enough that a determined and frightened android might squeeze through and into whatever space might lie beyond it.

The detective stuck his flashlight between his teeth, then used both hands to give the closet door a hard push. It rocked briefly, but didn’t shift, so he tried again, and was gratified when it grudgingly slid open a few extra inches. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to let Connor through without squeezing, so he pushed through into the tiny, cramped space, forced into a crouch by the fallen shelf in order to peer into the hole.

There was an extremely narrow space beyond the drywall, and Connor began to doubt his theory that someone might be hiding there until he stuck his head carefully through for a better look. His flashlight, in hand once more, caught a pair of shoes first, making the detective blink, then trace his way up a pair of legs, and eventually to the terrified features of a battered VB800.

They stared at one another for a moment until Connor finally broke the silence and said, “Hello.” The android, who a quick scan informed him was the missing Trent, flinched, and tried to push further back into the space between the walls. “It’s alright,” Connor said quickly, voice gentle as he stuck both his hands into view so the android could see he was unarmed. “My name is Connor, I’m a detective with the DPD.”

Trent stopped trying to slide out of sight and regarded his fellow android with wide eyes. “You’re with the police?” he asked in a hushed, tremulous voice, made even more so by some minor malfunction in his speech hardware.

“I am,” Connor said with a small smile.

“But you’re an android,” Trent said doubtfully, gaze lingering on the LED at the detective’s temple.

Connor withdrew his free hand and felt for the badge he kept on his belt, unclipping it deftly without taking his eyes off Trent. The android started to flinch away again when it saw his hand come back into view with something gripped in it, but the detective just motioned for calm and turned it so he could see the familiar flash of silver. “I’m an android detective,” he explained. “I’m assisting on this case,” Connor continued, “Would you be willing to come out and talk to me about what happened?”

“I-” Trent hesitated, panic threatening to overcome him once more.

“It’s alright,” Connor said soothingly, glad he didn’t have pain receptors the way humans did. Hank would have been complaining long and loud about the strain on his back from the awkward position he was crouching in had he been there. To his credit, though, he would have waited until after he’d coaxed the witness out of the closet, first. “You’re Trent, right?” he asked, “You called 911?”

The android was still for a moment, then nodded woodenly, gaze drifting from Connor’s face to the dusty wall at his nose. “He was killing us,” Trent whispered and closed his eyes. “If he hadn’t gotten a call when he did, I-I-”

The LED at the android’s temple had been red since Connor had found him, but the light began to flicker faster now, worrying the detective.

“I know,” he said, tilting his head in an attempt to catch the other android’s eye. “But it’s alright, you’re safe now; I’m here to help. No one’s going to hurt you, I promise.”

Trent pressed his eyes shut tight for a moment, then nodded and met Connor’s gaze again. The detective smiled and asked, “How about you come out, and we can go outside to talk?”

“A-alright,” the VB800 said at last, then began to carefully scoot towards the opening in the drywall.

Connor withdrew his head, giving the other android space to maneuver, then backed himself carefully out of the closet. He remained crouched in the doorway, smiling encouragingly when Trent peered through the hole at him, then carefully pushed his way out. The detective backed out further, and when he was free of the cramped space, rose to his feet, then bent at the waist to offer the other android a hand up.

When he did, the VB800’s grateful smile dropped into a look of naked fear and he froze, hand halfway to Connor’s as his focus shifted from the detective’s face, to something behind him.

Immediately on red alert, the detective spun on heel just in time to catch a blow to the face from a heavy length of pipe that sent him immediately offline.

Connor came to forty-eight seconds later, his impact shocked system finally recovering enough to allow his consciousness to return online, though not to any sort of good news. 

The bio-component of his left eye was so badly damaged that it was only transmitting data intermittently, making the view from where he lay in a heap on the floor disorienting and unsteady. More pressing, however, was the alarm his diagnostics system was blaring, though it took Connor a moment to fully comprehend what it was telling him. When he did, however, he went immediately into panic mode.

His thirium regulator was missing, and his blue blood levels were critically low.

As his estimated time to shut down ticked down, Connor struggled to lift his head and rolled onto his side so he could see his abdomen, which was soaked with the blue blood his system was still hemorrhaging. Where his regulator normally resided was an empty hole, but when he looked around the room, he could not see where it had gone.

Unfortunately, he  _ could  _ see Trent. He was impaled on a section of pipe that jutted from the pile of roof debris by the closet, as though he had fallen backwards onto it in a struggle.

With one eye component offline, Connor’s scanning program was no longer functional, but he didn’t need it to know that the other android was already dead… and he wasn’t far behind.

The detective tried to call out for help, but no sound came. He pressed one hand to the gaping hole in his abdomen and looked around desperately for some answer to a seemingly impossible problem, but found nothing but his now deceased witness, a pile of debris, and…

And almost a dozen lobotomized androids.

As the countdown to his demise entered the single digits, Connor threw himself back onto his stomach and dragged his barely functioning body across the floor, arm over arm until he closed the few feet between himself and the nearest android. Without looking up to see the model, the detective reached out and wrapped one blue stained hand around an exposed ankle and activated his emergency data transfer program.

This time, when Connor opened his eyes, there was no blare of alarms heralding his doom, but there was a brief moment of disorientation as his consciousness settled into its new home. Several of his programs went immediately offline as they found no accompanying hardware to support them, but the detective was too confused by the shift in perspective to immediately note which ones.

He blinked several times as his eyes synchronized with his system, then glanced down at the ground to see himself, or his body, anyways, finally fail and fall slack across the dirty floor. Connor tugged his new ankle free of his own hand’s grip, frowning as he struggled to process everything that had happened.

He’d been attacked from behind just as he’d finally coaxed Trent out of the wall, but by who? And why? And Trent… they’d seen to him too as soon as Connor was out of the way.

Despite his eyes seeming to function perfectly well, the detective still felt that his surroundings looked strange _ ,  _ and a moment later he realized it was because he was viewing them from a significantly lower vantage point than he was accustomed to.

Looking down at his hands and his body with a more critical eye this time, Connor realized that both were quite a bit smaller than the norm. After a brief glance at the androids to either side of him, he realized that, of all the bodies to pick from, he’d managed to transfer himself into the YK500 model. A huff of annoyance escaped him, but he quickly set it aside in favor of addressing the larger issue at hand.

He needed help.

Connor’s first instinct was to leave the room in search of assistance from a fellow officer, and he even went so far as to step over his own body on his way to the door before cold, hard logic caught up with him.

There was a murderer in the house, but the only people allowed  _ in _ said house at the moment were ATTF agents and DPD officers; ergo, his would-be killer was either an agent… or a fellow officer.

The detective stood very still in the center of the room as he processed this piece of information. The sudden revelation that he had no idea who he could or could not trust loomed huge and terrible over his diminutive figure. Connor thought fast, running down a mental list of everyone he’d seen on the scene since arriving. Agents aside, he had a passing familiarity with all the police, but he wasn’t more than an acquaintance with any of them, and in Gavin’s case, an outright antagonist.

Reflexively, Connor’s shoulders went up around his ears and his hands went to his chest as his fingers curled into the fabric of his hoodie sleeves. Whoever had just tried to kill him hadn’t wanted him to talk to Trent, which meant they had something to hide here at the crime scene. Their own involvement in the trafficking ring, most likely, which meant Trent might have been able to identify them…

It might not be one of the DPD at all, he told himself, it could just as likely be one of the ATTF agents. Then again, it could be both, there was no guarantee that the corruption stopped at a single department. The thought filled Connor with a deep dread and he felt himself in danger of spiraling into an outright panic. What was he going to do? There was no one he could trust, he was stuck in this tiny, weak body with no way back into his old one unless he was able to get it repaired. Emergency data transference was an ability unique to the RK line, and while they could technically put themselves  _ into  _ any manner of android body, getting back out was another story.

He was all alone.

Tears sprang to the corners of his eyes at the thought, surprising him and making the android wonder distantly if something about his new body made it more difficult for him to keep his emotions under control. Connor wiped at his cheeks with the cuff of a sleeve, though the flow of tears didn’t stop as he was overcome by an overwhelming  _ need  _ to be hugged and told everything would be alright. He wanted someone he could trust to take his hand and lead him out of that thirium soaked house and take him somewhere he could feel safe until they figured out what was going on and put the bad guy away where they could never hurt Connor ever again…

If not for Gavin’s call, he could have been at Hank’s house watching a basketball game right now, contentedly petting Sumo as he sprawled across his lap and Hank shouted at the tv every time his favorite team missed a free-throw.

A frisson of hope shot up Connor’s spine.

Hank.  _ Of course.  _ Sure as the detective knew the sun rose in the east, he knew he could trust Hank Anderson with his life.

The problem, however, was getting to him without anyone else the wiser so he didn’t tip off whoever it was that had tried to kill him before he could identify and bring them to justice.

Hope drove away the fear and panic that had threatened to overwhelm Connor’s system moments before and he rallied, thinking fast. First of all, he needed to either hide until the crime scene quieted down, or he needed to get out now before someone discovered his and Trent’s bodies.

Keenly aware of the shrinking window of time he was working with, Connor closed the distance between himself and the door and listened. Hearing no one outside, he cracked it carefully and peered out into the hall. Seeing no one, he opened it a little wider and poked his head out. He could hear people talking in the distance, mostly from downstairs, though the officer documenting the androids in the room down the hall was still there as well, he was certain.

The detective glanced up at the window at the end of the hall, then stepped out an peered through it. It had begun to rain since he entered the room a few minutes before, the kind of heavy downpour that immediately soaked the earth and had driven everyone either away from the scene or into the shelter of the house.

Heartened by this development, Connor carefully pushed at the window, whose lock appeared to have been broken for some time, and flinched when it creaked. Paranoid, he ducked back into the room and waited, but when no one appeared, or even stuck their head out into the hall, he crept back out and pushed again, pausing each time it threatened to make a noise until it was just open enough for him to squeeze his scrawny body through.

Climbing up onto the sill quietly was a bit of a task thanks to his new lack of height, but the detective managed, and made sure to close the window behind him as he crouched on the roof in the rain. He was soaked to the skin in moments, squinting against the downpour as he scooted carefully over the tiles to the edge where he had noticed the gutter on his first inspection of the roof.

The yard below was still empty, as were the back and front yards so far as he could see, so Connor dropped onto his stomach and let his legs dangle over the edge of the roof. He gripped the gutter carefully, though it creaked under even his minimal weight, then took a breath and allowed himself to slide down. He could feel the anchors wobble dangerously as he did, but he hit the ground before they could give way, stumbling a little at the impact, barely managing to avoid taking a spill in the fresh mud.

Connor crouched there for a moment, looking furtively around him before he dragged the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head and darted across the narrow expanse of lawn to a gap in the neighboring fence. He vanished through it with no one the wiser, footprints washed away almost immediately by the heavy downpour.


	2. Is that an obolus in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are at chapter two. Sorry, Hank 8'D Someone give this man a hug.  
> Make sure to drop a review if you liked it and let me know what your favorite part was! I always love hearing that from my readers!  
> Follow me [on tumblr](https://joliemariella.tumblr.com/) for sneak peeks on future chapters as well as my other art and writing!

Rain pounded the roof of Hank’s car as he pulled out of the precinct parking lot and began his drive home. The lieutenant scowled at the downpour and turned his wipers up to max, grumbling a little to himself as he pushed a few strands of damp, curly hair back out of his face and merged into oncoming traffic. He passed through several lights until the flow of cars around him slowed and he dragged his phone out of his pocket, then clicked it into the windshield mount over his dash.

“Call Connor,” he told the device and it beeped in confirmation then proceeded to do so. 

Before Hank could even settle back into his seat to wait for it to dial, though, an automatic message played. “The number as dialed is currently unavailable, please leave a message after the-”

The man frowned and hung up before it could go to message, brow furrowed deeply at this development. Connor letting his call go to message wasn’t unheard of, but considering he was capable of carrying on a phone conversation in perfect silence while performing other tasks without any loss of productivity on his part, it  _ was _ rare.

The fact that his number was ‘unavailable’, however, was downright strange.

“Call Connor,” he told his phone again, but received the same message, so he gave up, fingers drumming absently against the steering wheel.

The weather  _ was  _ a mess, maybe one of the local towers had been struck by lightning and gone offline? Possible, though unlikely in this day and age.

His phone rang and Hank told it to answer without glancing at the screen. “Hello,” he said automatically as he glanced over his shoulder at the traffic behind him before changing lanes.

“Hank,” Jeffrey Fowler replied, taking the lieutenant by surprise. He’d assumed it’d been Connor returning his calls; that the Captain was calling him after hours couldn’t be a good sign. 

“Yeah, what’s up?” the lieutenant asked warily, mentally crossing his fingers that he wasn’t about to have another case dropped on him just as he was finally about to spend a relaxing night in watching a game and knocking back a few beers, Connor or no Connor. Granted, he hoped the kid would be there; basketball was always more fun when you had someone to complain to or cheer with, depending on how the game was going for your respective team.

“I need you to come back in,” the captain said, tone serious, but hard to read beyond that.

Hank groaned as his worst fears were confirmed. “Oh fuck that!” the lieutenant complained. “Come on, Jeffrey, this is my first early day in two weeks, drop a case on someone else for a change, would you?” he groused as he braked, bringing his car to a stop at a red light.

“It’s not a case, Hank,” Fowler said with a sigh, and the detective could practically see him pinching the bridge of his nose as he spoke. “It’s Connor.”

Wrongfooted by his statement, Hank blinked then heaved a sigh of his own and asked, “Oh god, what’s he gone and gotten himself into this time?” There was silence on the other end of the line, and as it grew, a cold, panicked sensation began to grow in the lieutenant’s gut. 

“Come back in, Hank,” was all Fowler said after a moment, and the words left Hank winded, like he’d just been suckerpunched.

Bile threatened to rise in the back of the lieutenant’s throat; he hadn’t been able to get a hold of Connor just now… his number wasn’t available. Suddenly, everything felt very far away- the sound of the rain, the honking of the cars behind him as the light turned green but he remained at a standstill. It was funny, because he felt like the world was rushing out from under him at about a hundred miles an hour.

“What happened?” Hank heard himself ask in a distant, strangled tone. There was more silence, and it was enough to drag the lieutenant back into himself as he demanded in a harsh, angry voice, “ _ What the fuck happened,  _ Jeffrey?!”

Fowler caved, finally, and said, “We’re still trying to figure that out. Looks like he got in a fight with another android and...”

“And what?” Hank asked, hands white knuckled on the steering wheel. The light was red again.

“I’m sorry, Hank,” Jeffrey said, the words dragged from him only with great effort on his part. “He’s gone.”

He’d been braced for the impact of the news, seen it coming at him like he was tied to the tracks in front of an oncoming train, but it didn’t help in the least. The words killed him just as sure as that train would have, but without the mercy of the oblivion that came after.

* * *

Hank wasn’t entirely sure how he made it back to the precinct, but the next time he found himself able to properly focus on the world around him again, he was pushing through the security point and back into the precinct proper. His face must have been a frightening thing to behold as he strode past his and Connor’s desks and headed for the hall that lead down to the evidence room. Officers, detectives, perps… they all practically jumped to get out of his way.

Probably for the best, Hank thought absently. He wasn’t sure how he’d react if someone tried to get in his way right about then. He was pretty sure Fowler appeared at some point during his death march across the bullpen, but Hank ignored him as he unlocked the door to the evidence room with his badge and made his way down the stairs.

There were two other officers already there, standing on the far side of two tables, on to one of which they were unloading an unfamiliar android from the stretcher they’d used to carry him down to the evidence room. On the other…

The officers turned to look at him when the sliding doors parted and they froze at the sight of him, like a pair of helpless bunny rabbits staring down a wolf. 

“Get out,” he said, voice rough, eyes dead as his gaze locked onto the still figure laid out on the table closest to him.

They fled without a word, not bothering to take the stretcher with them in their haste.

When he was alone, Hank forced himself to take first one step into the room, then another, and the doors closed behind him, sealing him off from the rest of the world in a glass bubble.

Connor lay completely motionless on the nearest table, arms at his sides, eyes closed. As he approached, Hank’s field of vision narrowed; all he could see was the android’s ruined face, and the man was forced to grab the edge of the table to steady himself as he felt the world begin to spin.

A horrible dent ran diagonally across Connor’s features, stretching from his left brow, over his nose, and down his right cheek. The damage was so bad that his outer skin had retreated from around the wound, leaving the white, now cracked plastic beneath exposed like a cartoonishly exaggerated scar. It didn’t take a detective to figure out that someone had hit Connor in the face with a length of pipe, though Hank knew that it wouldn’t have been a killing blow, not to an android as sturdy as his partner.

The lieutenant forced himself to take a long, unsteady breath as he realized he’d forgotten to breathe, then forced his eyes away from Connor’s face and down to his abdomen. He was still wearing his gray suit jacket, though it was unbuttoned, exposing the once pristine, white, button-up shirt beneath. It was stained a deep sapphire color and missing several buttons, as if someone had torn it open with great force to expose the skin below.

Hank stood there for a long moment, staring at the horrible stain, already certain of what he would find beneath, but knowing he had to see for himself all the same. Eventually, with a shaking hand, he gently pushed aside the shirt and exposed the gaping hole where Connor’s thirium regulator had once been. He stared at it for a minute, then carefully set the android’s clothes back to rights with gentle, though trembling hands.

When he was done, he realized that several of his fingertips had been stained blue, and the air all rushed out of him at once as it registered that it was Connor’s blood, cold and tacky and rapidly falling out of focus as tears blurred his vision. 

He couldn’t cry. Not right here, not right now.

The lieutenant forced himself to take another breath and turned his gaze to the ceiling as he fought for control, took all the pain and shoved it down deep inside with the merciless efficiency that only those intimately familiar with grief and accustomed to loss could manage. 

Finally, when he was able, he looked back at Connor once more and noticed for the first time that his hair was a mess. Without thinking, he reached out and, with utmost tenderness, smoothed the wild strands back from the android’s face until they lay neatly once more. 

He wanted to say something. Wanted to apologize for not being there when Connor needed him, for not protecting him. He wanted to call him ‘son’ one more time, but this time he’d make it clear that he meant it in the most literal way possible. Hank wanted Connor to know how much he’d come to mean to him over the past year, what a joy it’d been watching him grow as a person and come into his own.

The tears were threatening again, forcing Hank to grit his teeth as he withdrew his hand and clenched it into a tight fist to stop it from shaking. Behind him, the doors hissed open once more and Hank was no longer alone in the evidence room. 

Silence weighed heavy over the scene, but eventually Hank gathered himself enough to glance over his shoulder to see Gavin standing there, wet and dripping from the rain still falling outside. His short, dark hair was plastered to his scalp, and he had the air of a man headed for the gallows about him. Hank couldn’t stand looking at the other detective, so he turned away, leaning heavily against the table on which Connor rested, eyes tracing over the android’s familiar features, imagining him the way he’d looked just a couple of hours before: full of life with one of his secretive little smiles tugging at his lips.

Minutes passed in silence until Gavin couldn’t take it anymore and he finally broke. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice rough, words strangely stilted as he forced them past his teeth, eyes locked on Hank’s slumped shoulders, as if the older man were Atlas, forced to bear the weight of the world itself.

It was the wrong thing to say, but Gavin couldn’t bring himself to move when Hank went suddenly rigid, then spun and advanced on him with a look of pure fury on his weathered features. The lieutenant grabbed him by the front of his rain slicked jacket and swung him around so his back slammed into the nearest section of shatterproof plexiglass wall.

The force of it drove the air from Gavin’s lungs, rendering him mute as Hank leaned in until they were almost nose-to-nose, teeth bared and blue eyes frighteningly intense as they bore into his own. 

“You’re  _ sorry _ ?” Hank snarled bitterly. He’d managed to push down his grief for the time being, but in its stead, rage, pure and unfiltered had boiled up in its place. “You’re fucking  _ sorry?! _ ” Regaining himself some, Gavin reached up and gripped the lieutenants wrists, but before he could try to wrest himself free, Hank gave him a hard shake and slammed him against the wall again. “He was only there in the first place because you couldn’t handle shit on your own!”

“I didn’t force him to go down there!” Gavin objected vehemently. The fury on the other man’s face shook him, but not so badly as the agony that so clearly loomed behind it, waiting in the wings to pounce just as soon as Hank’s anger abated long enough to give it an opening.

A sound of almost animal rage and pain escaped the older man at the detective’s words and he shook him again. “You hated him,” Hank hissed accusingly through grit teeth. “You hated him and now he’s dead! Are you happy now, Reed? Look at him!”

Gavin grunted in surprise as the lieutenant shifted his grip and, instead of slamming him up against the wall again, dragged him away from it then shoved him bodily towards the table on which Connor had been laid out.

The detective stumbled and fetched up against the cold steel surface, gripping it tight with his hands as he found his face inches from Connor’s ruined one, only just saving himself from falling bodily across the android. Gavin inhaled reflexively, and flinched visibly at the chemical scent of blue blood that lingered around the android, soaked in the stuff as he was. The damage across his face, the detective thought distantly as his eyes roved over his one time rival’s features, was like an exaggerated mirror image of his own facial scarring.

Unable to bear looking at Connor’s too still features a moment longer, Gavin pushed himself upright and took a sharp step backwards as an unexpected wave of complicated emotions washed over him.

“He was a plastic prick with a smart mouth that didn’t know when to shut up,” the detective said, voice low as his gaze dropped to the floor, unable to meet Hank’s eyes. “-but he was DPD. He didn’t deserve this,” he finished quietly, expression grim.

The detective felt nausea building within him as he stared at his shoes, hands clenching to fists in the pockets of his jacket. The fact that Connor was gone, well and truly gone, was finally beginning to settle over him. Deviants didn’t come back from the dead any more than if it had been him or Hank laid out on the table in that brightly lit, uncomfortably chilly room. Once upon a time he might have laughed, or even celebrated, but now... he found no pleasure in Connor’s demise.

Just shame, he thought. Shame and regret.

When had he stopped looking at Connor like a machine to be cast aside at earliest convenience and started treating him as a rival? An equal against whom he was directly competing for prestige within the confines of the precinct? He couldn’t think of a particular moment that had brought about the change, though some of the horrors he’d witnessed the night of the revolution had probably gone some ways towards making him finally see androidkind as people rather than appliances. He’d been forced to shoot one too many of them as they begged for mercy on their knees in the snow, until he’d reached a point where he’d half expected them to bleed red instead of blue before that long night finally came to an end.

He’d been in therapy for months before the nightmares finally abated.

Connor had changed too, he realized in retrospect. Treating him as an equal had become easier over time as the android developed his own wants and needs, likes and dislikes. He’d developed a taste for sarcasm and a determined streak that rendered him incapable of backing down in the face of Gavin’s attempts to bully him. Connor had forced the other detective to recognize him as an equal through sheer willpower, and though he hadn’t recognized what was going on at the time, Gavin had unconsciously developed a grudging respect for the android as a result.

And he’d died on his watch.

Hank was right, Connor had only been on the scene because Gavin had asked for his help, and the poor bastard had been murdered right upstairs and he hadn’t even  _ heard  _ it. It’d been one of the officers, Johnson, he thought absently, that had found him dead in a pool of his own thirium. She’d been cataloguing the lobotomized androids in the room just down the hall and had discovered Connor and the other android when she’d moved on to document the ones in the office.

Gavin had practically jumped out of his skin when he’d heard her scream, then sprinted up the stairs to see what she’d found. He’d hardly been able to believe his eyes, and had, for a long moment, wondered if this weren’t yet another one of his terrible nightmares returned to haunt him. 

Finally, the detective couldn’t take being in the evidence room anymore. Seeing Connor laid out on a table inspired a gut churning guilt in him, and the weight of Hank’s grief and anger threatened to crush him if he lingered a moment longer.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he finally managed to choke out, still unable to look at Hank as he spun on heel and left the evidence room as abruptly as he’d arrived.

The lieutenant watched him go, anger bleeding from him steadily to be replaced by a numbness that seemed to radiate from his very marrow. After a minute, he approached Connor once more and stood, silent and grave, beside him until he finally worked up the strength to take one of his son’s hands in both of his.

It was cold to the touch, and no matter how long he pressed it between his warm ones, that was how it remained.

* * *

Getting to the crime scene had taken Connor twelve minutes by cab earlier that afternoon when Gavin had first called him. Trying to traverse the same distance in the body of a child during a torrential downpour took significantly longer. Hours longer.

Beyond the sheer distance of it, and his inability to purchase a cab thanks to the fact that his new body was not linked to his bank account, came the added complication of avoiding notice. People, he realized, automatically started asking questions when they saw a small, skinny boy walking down a city street alone in the rain. He knew they were well intentioned, and on any other day he might have felt a little better about the state of the world to see their concern, but today it would only caused problems. He didn’t want anyone calling the police or finding out where he was going, so after the second person tried to stop him and ask where his parents were, Connor started sticking to the shadows where possible.

It added time to his trek, but it was a necessary evil, so he bore with it.

Androids, even child androids, didn’t get tired, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t emotionally exhausted by the time he finally reached the precinct. He’d long since deactivated his ability to feel cold, but his sensors were still running and informed him that he was getting dangerously cold, under-dressed for the weather as he was. Connor supposed he was lucky that the YK500 he’d taken over had been wearing a decent pair of sneakers for walking, though he wished he’d had more than a hoodie to save him from the rain. It, his t-shirt, and jeans had been soaked clean through within minutes of his escaping the scene of his own murder.

When he turned the corner and saw the familiar building, Connor had actually broken into a brief run, relief at the sight of it surging through him and bringing tears to his eyes. He’d checked himself quickly, though, and ducked into an alley before he could attract attention. Returning to the precinct may have felt a lot like finally making it home, but Connor reminded himself that it was entirely possible his killer had made it back before him. Not that they’d be able to recognize him… but still. 

Better safe than sorry.

Rather than going inside, Connor made a beeline for the parking lot then roamed up and down the aisles of vehicles until he finally spotted Hank’s familiar, battered car. A sob of relief actually escaped the android at the sight of it, which under any other circumstances would have struck him as absurd. Today, however, it meant that Hank was still at the precinct, that Connor wouldn’t have to walk the many miles out into suburbia to make it to his house.

Connor tried the driver’s side door but, unsurprisingly, found it locked. Frowning to himself, he looked around the shadowed lot and saw no one else, though that didn’t mean it’d stay that way. He could always hunker down under the car, roll out and reveal himself to Hank when the man went home for the night. On the other hand, having that kind of confrontation right there in the parking lot next to the precinct probably wasn’t a great idea.

Not for the first time since leaving the crime scene hours before, Connor couldn’t help but dwell on the fact that Hank most likely thought he was dead. In fact, there was a good chance he was inside with Connor’s  _ actual  _ body right now…

The detective mopped absently at his dripping face with a wet sleeve and sighed, pushing the thought aside. Whatever pain Hank was going through right now, he’d fix it. It’d be okay. He just had to keep it together long enough to actually talk to him and they’d work everything out.

Making up his mind, Connor went around to the trunk and, using the trick Hank had taught him to jimmy the faulty latch, managed to get it open. The android paused and regarded it for a moment, relieved that at least the space was mostly empty, just some emergency supplies and other miscellaneous junk that left more than enough space for a small boy to make himself comfortable. Comfortable-ish.

The sound of voices in the distance made Connor start, then hurriedly climb into the trunk and close it as quietly as he could behind him, leaving him in complete darkness. Well, almost complete darkness. As his eyes adjusted, the android realized that  there was a thin seam of light glimmering through the back of the seat that made up the rear wall of the trunk. A moment’s consideration of his mental map of the car’s interior told Connor that this was the drop down center section in the back seat that doubled as an armrest, as well as quick access to the trunk.

Reorienting himself, Connor gave the panel a firm push, and after a moment’s resistance, it gave way, folding down and revealing a small opening. A quick scan revealed that, with a little squeezing, the android’s new, smaller body  _ should  _ be able to fit through and into the back seat, which would be a much better place to wait than the actual trunk.

He had to pull off his dripping hoodie to make it happen, but Connor  _ did  _ manage to worm his way through the narrow opening, spilling happlessly into the back seat and laying there for a moment across the familiar cushions, feeling very pleased with himself. After a minute, though, it occurred to him that anyone walking by could simply glance through the window and spot a small boy where he most definitely should not be.

Connor sat up and looked around for options. Luckily, Hank had a habit of leaving his cast off jackets and coats in the back seat, which would not only help the android warm up, but keep him out of sight. Darkness had long since fallen over the city, so the shadows within the car were deep, particularly on the floor behind the front seats. Connor dragged his own hoodie back on, then tucked himself down behind the passenger seat, carefully dragged a jacket and a badly wrinkled sweater over him, and settled in to wait.

He didn’t have to do so for long. Ten minutes later, Connor could just make out the sound of approaching footsteps over the dull rattle of rain on the roof of the car. His nerves spiked as he heard keys in the driver side door and he remained perfectly motionless in that way only androids could manage as Hank pulled the door open and got in.

Before the lieutenant could shut the door, however, someone called his name, making the man pause, half-in, half-out of the car as he looked listlessly back over his shoulder to see who had chased after him. Connor didn’t dare uncover himself enough to catch a glimpse, but he didn’t need to, he immediately recognized Captain Fowler’s voice.

“Keep your phone on you, Hank,” the captain said, breathing a little labored, no doubt from his run to catch up to the lieutenant.

“What for?” Hank growled, though there was no real heat behind the words. He just sounded… tired. “You gave me two weeks to… You gave me two weeks. Let me have it.”

Fowler sighed. “I’m ordering wellness checks on you, Hank, so answer your damn phone when one of us calls or I’m sending someone out to your house.”

A sound of disgust escaped Hank as he pulled his other leg into the car. “Oh fuck off, Jeffrey. I don’t need a fucking babysitter,” the lieutenant spat as he grabbed for the door handle and tried to shut it.

Fowler maintained his grip on the door frame, however, and held it open, his bulk blocking any and all of Hank’s attempts to shut him out. “Yes, I really think you do, Hank,” he said, voice low and not unkind. The lieutenant stopped fighting him, and Jeffrey continued, “I know you two were close; I know he was like a-”

“Don’t,” Hank cut him off, the single word sharp and cutting as a blade. There was a moment of quiet filled only by the sound of rain, and then, “Don’t,” he repeated, softer this time as he crumpled back into his seat, the brief spark of anger gone as quickly as it’d appeared.

The captain sighed, then said, “Just answer your phone, Hank, or I swear to god I’ll send someone down to kick in your door, got it?”

Hank didn’t reply, but he must have nodded as Fowler took a step back and finally let the lieutenant shut his door and drive away without further interference.

The interior of the car was silent but for the sound ambient traffic and the patter of rain, making the air in the cabin feel almost thick, like it had a physical weight that pressed down on Connor in an attempt to smother him. He wanted to peer out at Hank, to check on him, but he knew better than to try. If by some chance he attracted the man’s attention, who knew how he’d react to a strange child stowed away in the back seat of his car? Distracted as he was, the surprise might be enough to make him get in a wreck, especially with the roads as bad as they were.

Time ticked inexorably on, and half an hour later they were still driving, making Connor wonder just where they were headed. Hank only lived fifteen to twenty minutes from the precinct, depending on the traffic, and even taking into account the weather they’d surely passed it already. Realizing there was nothing he could do but wait out the interminable drive, the android remained hidden, though his concern grew with every minute that passed.

Another fifteen minutes later, they finally came to a stop and Hank put the car in park, grabbed something from the glove compartment, then got out, not bothering to lock up behind him. Connor listened as the lieutenant’s footsteps quickly faded from hearing, and when he didn’t hear anything further for two entire minutes, the android finally dared to peep out from under his cover.

From his position on the floor, the only thing he could see through the rear passenger window across from him was deep, unbroken darkness and raindrops rolling down the glass. Still hearing nothing, Connor carefully leveraged himself up just high enough to peek through the window at his back, and managed to catch a brief glimpse of a long parking lot and a tall wrought iron fence.

At a complete loss as to where Hank had brought them in the middle of a torrential downpour, Connor dropped down again, a frown on his small face. He hadn’t seen Hank anywhere, so the android dared to shift position so he could look out the windshield. There was still no sign of the other detective as Connor squinted through the dark to see that they were parked directly (and illegally) in front of an ornate gate that matched the fence that surrounded it. Beyond that was a rolling, cluttered lawn that took a long moment for Connor to recognize for what it was.

A graveyard.

Worry immediately spiked through Connor’s system, and after only a second’s hesitation, the detective dragged his hood back up over his head and slid the jacket he’d been hiding under up over his skinny arms to rest on his narrow shoulders before opening the door and stepping out into the rain. Hank’s jacket swam laughably on him, hanging down to his knees on his new body, but Connor ignored it in favor of carefully shutting the car door behind him so as not to attract any attention before moving quietly towards the gate.

He hesitated in front of it and read the words worked into the arch that stretched overhead, though it offered him no comfort. The worry he’d felt immediately spiked sharply into outright fear as he realized that Hank hadn’t brought them to just any graveyard… he’d brought them to the graveyard where he’d laid Cole to rest four years earlier.

On the verge of panic, uncertain as to what Hank might have planned for this after hours visit to his son’s grave (had Fowler confiscated his pistol? That was standard procedure for detectives put on wellness check status after a loss, wasn’t it? What had Hank taken from the glove compartment before getting out of the car?), Connor closed the distance between himself and the gate. It bore a heavy lock, but the android tried it anyways, and was surprised to find that it opened easily under his hand, allowing him through without resistance.

Connor frowned absently at this, but put aside any question of how Hank had gotten in in favor of darting immediately past it and down the sidewalk that lead towards the nearest row of graves.

This close to the gate, the graves were quite old, monuments to people long since gone, hailing from a time when statues were common headstones and space was plentiful in the graveyard.

The path split, and Connor hesitated at the y, uncertain of which direction to go. He’d never actually visited Cole’s grave before, never quite had the nerve to ask Hank if he could, though he’d wanted to. Just once. He knew Hank went every year on the anniversary of Cole’s death, but the lieutenant had never given much detail on the subject, and Connor hadn’t dared ask for any. 

He regretted it now.

Desperate, the android cast around for help, but found none. The graveyard was lit by the occasional lamp along the path, but their golden light was muted in the rain, and didn’t afford much clarity among the tombstones anyways. They did, however, illuminate a nearby mausoleum, an ancient thing that looked quite well tended, and sported a decorative trellis at its front. The flowers that had once grown there were dead, but the trellis seemed sturdy enough to support the meager weight of a child…

Connor rushed forward and started to scale it, fighting the overlong sleeves of Hank’s jacket every step of the way, but eventually he managed to make it to the roof. Not without a panicked, scrabbling moment as his grip threatened to slip on rain slicked stone, however, but Connor eventually got a foot kicked up and over and hauled himself to safety. The android didn’t let himself rest, but pushed immediately to his feet and turned this way and that, eyes squinting against both the rain and the dark in hopes of spotting Hank’s familiar figure in the distance. 

Just as he was about to give up, something moved out across the lawn some ways away, past the point where the old and elaborate tombstones transitioned into more modest models, and then fell away to uninterrupted grass. No doubt this was the newest section of the graveyard where plaques set into the ground were used rather than the ostentatious markers of generations past.

It was hard to make out, but after a moment’s hard staring, Connor was certain he’d found Hank. That or someone else had broken into the graveyard in the middle of a rainstorm that night.

The android half-climbed, half-fell back down the mausoleum’s trellis and hurried off across the lawn, eschewing the path in favor of a more direct route through the tombstones. He tripped once, over some unseen obstacle in the dark and scraped his knee, nearly making him yelp with surprise. He managed to clamp down on the impulse, though, and pushed himself upright and hurried on, weaving his way through the veritable maze of graves, glad for his internal compass. An actual child would have certainly become lost in the dark.

Connor didn’t slow his pace as he breached the barrier between old and new sections of the graveyard until he came within a handful of yards of the morose figure standing over a small stone and brass plaque set in grass at his feet. The android came to a stop as the man, who stood with his back to him, lifted his head to reveal a shock of familiar silver hair plastered to his scalp by the rain that had yet to let up in the slightest.

Hank didn’t say anything for a long moment, but sighed and lifted a shaking hand to push the fall of his hair back from his face as he stared into the night. Watching him, Connor found himself unable to move, suddenly uncertain how he was going to explain himself, what he could possibly say to the grieving man in front of him to make up for the pain he’d gone through that night.

“Dammit,” Hank muttered, so soft that Connor could only barely hear him over the rain. His voice was thick and choked with emotion as the android watched him drop to his knees, shoulders shaking with suppressed sobs until he finally broke and screamed into the night, “ _ Goddammit! _ ” The force of his cry made the man double over at the waist, arms wrapped around himself as if in some attempt to keep from flying apart at the seams. The curse turned into a cry of pure grief too powerful to be bound by mere words, the intensity of it driving Hank to press his forehead into the wet earth under his knees. Like his body was trying to physically purge itself of the agony welling up from deep within by wringing the very breath from his lungs. 

It didn’t work the first time, so it tried again, and the sound, inhuman at first hearing, and then so very,  _ very  _ human as it dragged on and on into the night, drew tears to Connor’s eyes. The android took a step forward, and then another as Hank’s cries finally died off and he lay on his knees, shoulders heaving as he gasped for breath. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to throw his arms around the man he’d come to view as a father, to tell him it was alright, he wasn’t alone. Not again. 

Deep within his system, an unmonitored program came online and ran automatically, though Connor was too distracted by Hank’s sudden return to a somewhat upright position to notice it. He watched at the man slipped a hand into his jacket pocket, and panicked when the distant golden glow of one of the path lights glinted off of something metallic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Hope you guys enjoyed! If so, make sure to drop me a review and let me know what your favorite part was, I love hearing that from you guys!


	3. Must Be This Tall to Fight Crime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back to chapter three! Another long one because it just didn't feel right cutting it off sooner than this, haha.   
> Make sure to drop a review if you liked it and let me know what your favorite part was! I always love hearing that from my readers!  
> Follow me [on tumblr](https://joliemariella.tumblr.com/) for sneak peeks on future chapters as well as my other art and writing!

“Hank!” Connor shouted, finally driven to break his silence by the terror blooming within him, convinced that he was about to witness the man’s long delayed suicide.

The lieutenant jolted in surprise and turned to look at Connor, shocked to find that he was not  alone at his son’s gravesite. “Jesus- _ fucking _ -Christ!” the man gasped when he laid eyes on the child lurking behind him in the dark. He struggled to get to his feet, but slipped on the wet grass and fell backwards instead, dropping something from one hand in the process.

It was a flask that tumbled across the grass, Connor realized with a surge of relief that threatened to rob his legs of their strength. It was a flask, not a gun that Hank had pulled from the glove compartment of his car.

“What the  _ fuck?! _ ” the lieutenant rasped as he finally managed to get to his feet, face pale, blue eyes wild, looking for all the world as though he’d seen a ghost.

For half a beat, Hank’s grief stricken mind was convinced he  _ had  _ seen a ghost, that it was Cole standing there before him, swathed in his own jacket, just like he’d used to do before-

But it wasn’t. It wasn’t Cole, the lieutenant realized as he raised one hand to press over his chest where his heart felt ready to burst clean through his ribcage. This boy did _ ,  _ however, bear an  _ uncanny  _ resemblance to his dead son, especially those big, expressive blue eyes.

The strange child took a step towards him, and Hank unconsciously took a step back in response, which made the boy frown. He raised his hands before him, though he had to give them a shake to make the overlong sleeves of Hank’s jacket fall back so they could actually be seen. “Hank, it’s alright, it’s Connor,” the little boy said in what he probably thought was a soothing tone.

Hank stared at him for a long, silent minute. After a moment, he said, “Oh. Good.”

“Yes,” Connor said, smiling as he took another step towards the lieutenant, who remained rooted in place this time. “I’m fine, you see, I-”

“You’re not a ghost.”

“No,” the android replied, the relief he’d been naive enough to feel fading at the statement as the sudden calm Hank appeared to be experiencing began to strike him as odd.

“So I’ve just lost my mind.”

“Uh-”

“About damn time.”

Connor watched as Hank bent and grabbed up the flask he’d dropped, uncapped it, then proceeded to take a long drag before turning and marching off into the stormy night. “Hank, wait!” the android called and chased after him. Maybe he should have waited until the other detective was in a calmer state of mind to confront him with the truth. He’d just been so worried about what Hank might do in his grief he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Please, just let me explain!”

“Oh, you don’t have to explain anything, ‘kid’,” Hank said with a bitter laugh and sarcastic, one-handed air quotes as he took another drink from his flask. “You’re just a… whatchca-call-it…  _ amalgamation  _ of my guilt and grief or some psych bullshit manifesting to haunt my ass and remind me what a horrible person I am for getting not just  _ one  _ son killed-” here he turned slightly to look at Connor, who was still trailing helplessly after him, “but  _ two.  _ Two brilliant kids snuffed out before their time like nothing cuz I wasn’t able to keep them safe.”

The smile that took over Hank’s features was brittle and full of self loathing, a heartbreaking sight that drew a fresh wave of tears to Connor’s eyes. They were in an old section of the graveyard now, surrounded on all sides by towering monuments to the dead, casting both of them in deep shadow.

“So, you know, you can go back to whatever wretched corner of my mangled brain you came from,” Hank said and waved his flask dismissively at Connor, walking backwards now. “Cuz trust me, you don’t have anything new to tell me; _I already know I’m a murdering piece of shit,”_ he continued with a bitter, almost pitying smile. “Come back when I black out and check out my nightmares, though. I’ll give you the tour,” the lieutenant drawled and lifted his flask for another drink.

Connor opened his mouth to beg him to calm down, to stop drinking his sadness away for  _ once in his damn life,  _ but before he could, Hank’s ankle caught a decorative bit stonework half-buried in the lawn by the passage of years. The man grunted as he started to topple over backwards, blue eyes going wide in surprise. 

Before he could begin to stumble though, Connor lunged forward, grabbed him by the wrist, and dragged him upright again.

“Holy shit,” Hank said, voice soft and surprised as he stared down at the child in front of him who still maintained a hold on his wrist, hands cold as ice against against his skin. Were manifestations of your inner guilt supposed to be able to touch you like that? Deciding this was the kind of question that a sober mind just wasn’t equipped to handle, Hank lifted his flask again, but before it moved more than a few inches, the child snatched it right out of his hand.

The lieutenant was so surprised that the boy was able to take it from him without resistance, and Hank could only watch as he then turned and hurled the flask away from them with a grunt of effort.

“Hey!” Hank exclaimed as it hummed away into the dark, spilling its contents in all directions along the way, and struck some distant tombstone with a loud clatter before disappearing from sight. The lieutenant scowled down at the boy and said, “That was a perfectly good thing of whiskey you-”

“Yes, I  _ do  _ know!” Connor snapped fiercely, blue eyes bright as he glared back up at Hank and stomped one foot impatiently in a show of frustration he’d never allowed himself to exhibit in the past. All of his very adult ‘self control’ tended to get in the way, but now, stuck as a child with only a fraction of his usual restraint, he was relishing the opportunity to let it out for the first time. “Fuck your whiskey, Hank, I’m sick of it! You were getting  _ better _ ; I’m not going to let you slip back to where you were because of me!”

“Oh fuck you, you little muppet, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” Hank snapped back. “You’re not Connor, you’re just some fucked up jigsaw of my hang-ups about Cole combined with my grief over losing my damn partner! You’re the two of them pushed together to form some sort of weird-” Hank seemed to run out of descriptors at that point, and could only gesture wildly at Connor’s new body, expression irritated.

“You just gestured at all of me!”

“Yeah,” the lieutenant snapped, “I did.”

Realizing he wasn’t getting anywhere, Connor tried another tact. “My name  _ is  _ Connor. I was an RK800, model number 313 248 317-51, and we first met at Jimmy’s bar on November fifth, 2038 where you were  _ also  _ drowning your sorrows in whiskey, and I made the stupid decision to buy you one for the road before we went to the scene of Carlos Ortiz’s murder.”

Hank scoffed and spun on heel, then started walking away, but Connor kept talking.

Details of their cases together during the week leading up the to revolution, the gift he’d gotten Hank for his birthday just a few weeks ago, that time they’d conned Gavin into picking up an extra case so they could go to a basketball game… Connor enumerated them all in exhaustive detail as they wandered through the graveyard. Hank didn’t seem to be heading anywhere in particular so much as  _ away  _ from Connor, appearing to ignore his cataloguing of their time together but, eventually, they found themselves within sight of the gate.

Before they reached it, however, Hank’s control finally broke and he rounded on the child behind him, expression a tortured mix of fury and grief as he shouted, “Shut  _ up _ ! Just shut the fuck up!”

His vehemence actually managed to make Connor not only stop in his tracks, but shut is mouth so hard his teeth clicked.

“What the hell are you trying to prove?” Hank demanded, words verging on a shout, voice rough with emotion. “You think this’ll somehow prove you’re really him?” he snapped with a sharp, frustrated wave of a hand. “I already  _ know  _ all of this! Or is that the point? Just drive me further down the fucking rabbit hole reminding me of all the little details of what a great fucking life I had before?” An ugly, heartbroken laugh escaped the man and he took a step away from Connor so he no longer loomed over him.

“God,” he muttered to himself as he pushed his sopping curls back from his haggard features, “that’s what this is, isn’t it?” The lieutenant closed his eyes and took a breath as he turned his face skyward. The rain had gradually begun to die off, and was now a miserable drizzle that seemed somehow colder than the downpour that had preceded it. “You’re just here to beat me over the head with how much I took him for granted until I crack and finally get the guts to shoot myself, aren’t you?”

Hank opened his eyes again and looked at Connor, a dead, tired expression on his face as he let both his hands drop to hang numbly at his sides.

“N-no!” the android managed to stammer, wiping furtively at the tears on his cheeks where they mingled with the rain. “I’d never hurt you, Hank, I’m just trying-”

“Go ‘try’ somewhere else, kid,” the man said with a sharp shake of his head then turned and started walking towards the gate.

At a loss for what else he could possibly do to convince Hank that he was not only who he claimed to be, but  _ not  _ a figment of his guilt stricken imagination, Connor felt himself slipping rapidly into panic again, entire system in danger of seizing and possibly failing altogether. If he couldn’t get Hank to believe him, then what was the point? He didn’t trust anyone else the way he did the lieutenant; he was utterly alone in the world, and the prospect terrified him. 

Hope slipping through his slender fingers, Connor felt himself begin to cry in earnest. It was a strange feeling that he had no control over at all, which only frightened him further as his shoulders began to shake with great, heart wrenching sobs that left him gasping. He wasn’t used to not being fully in control, to being subject to unfamiliar subroutines that left him in the backseat of his own body.

He was scared and alone and all he wanted, all he  _ really  _ wanted was…

“H-Hank!” Connor wailed helplessly as he rubbed fruitlessly at his tear stained cheeks with his soaking coat sleeves. The tears were coming so thick and fast now that he could barely even make out the lieutenant as he walked away.

The cry brought Hank up short just shy of the gate, dragging his gaze from the sidewalk under his shoes to look back over his shoulder at his own personal ghost. He knew he shouldn’t, but the sound of such genuine distress coming from a child triggered a parental instinct he’d thought long dead and buried. What the hell was he supposed to do with this? Granted, the kid was crying the way  _ he  _ wanted to cry right then, so maybe it was just his subconscious trying to bleed off some of the pain welling up in his own heart... but still.

Realizing that Hank had stopped and looked back, Connor opened his mouth to speak, but  found he couldn’t. A sound of frustration escaped the android as he rubbed at his face and tried again. “Do you- do you remember the morning after the revolution? When we met up at the Chicken Feed?” Connor managed to ask in a small, distressed voice as he finally dropped his hands to his sides.

Deciding to indulge his guilt for a moment in hopes that doing so would make it relent a little and leave him alone for awhile, Hank sighed heavily and said, “Yeah?”

“When you saw me, you didn’t even say anything, you just gave me a hug,” Connor said, expression wistful and pained. “-and that… that was the first time I really  _ knew  _ everything was going to be okay.”

The words were like a knife in Hank’s heart, and he felt his hands tighten into fists inside his jacket pockets. The child was losing his fight to maintain control of his emotions, and was starting to cry again. It was brutal, watching a boy that looked so much like his own son fall apart like that.

“After all the fear and the bloodshed, in the face of all those unknowns… when you hugged me, it felt like I’d come  _ home _ ,” Connor admitted, shoulders shaking as he buried his face in his hands again, the heels of his palms pressed into his eyes in a vain attempt to staunch the flow of tears. He’d never told anyone this before, let alone Hank, but there on the verge of losing everything, any shyness he’d felt on the matter was dead and gone. “I had this epiphany;” he said voice barely above a whisper. “It was so  _ simple _ ; like- Oh,  _ this  _ is what family is.  _ This  _ was why you were so sad, because you’d had this once and then you... then you lost it and-” 

A small, distressed sound escaped the android and he suddenly found himself unable to stand. Connor’s skinny legs simply folded up on him and he found himself squatting on his heels, face pressed into his cold, wet knees.

“I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose it too!  _ You’re _ my family, Hank, and I-I just-” A hoarse, wretched cry was pulled from his chest before he said, in pleading tone, “I kind of died today, Hank, and I could really use a hug right-”

There were arms around him then, lifting him easily into the air before dragging him into a tight embrace against a broad chest. Connor went rigid with surprise, then limp with relief as he found his head resting against Hank’s shoulder, the breath all rushing out of him in a single breath. Without his telling them to, the android’s arms went immediately around the man’s neck and he buried his face in the collar of Hank’s waterlogged coat.

“It’s alright, son, I’ve got you,” Hank said, voice rough with emotion, hands shaking as he cradled the boy in his arms, holding him tight, as though he were afraid Connor might disappear if he let him go. “I’ve got you,” he repeated, tilting his head so his cheek rested against Connor’s hood.

It was too much. God, it was all too much to happen in one day. Hank felt like he’d been run through a blender then told to pull himself together and stand upright under his own power like nothing had happened. Impossible though it sounded, though, he’d damn well do it for Connor’s sake, because whatever had happened to his son, whatever body he happened to be inhabiting at the moment, that’s what the android was. His son. And he’d go through hell itself if it meant getting him back.

“I’m so sorry, Connor,” he said, tears rolling down his cheeks and disappearing into his beard. “I’m such a fucking idiot, I’m sorry,” Hank continued as he rubbed the android’s back absently in hopes of soothing the tremors and hiccuping sobs that still shook his little body. “You’re alright now, you’re safe. I won’t let anyone hurt you again,” he continued quietly, voice low and vehement as he rocked gently back and forth the way he had Cole all those years ago.

Gradually, Connor’s tears slowed and all his pent up stress and fear fled in the face of Hank’s gentle, familiar voice murmuring quiet reassurances in his ear. The android’s eyes slipped closed and his tremors faded under his father’s soothing hand. He wanted to thank Hank, to tell him how happy he was to see him again, how much he loved him… but he was tired. Tired in a way he’d never experienced before, and rather than words, all that managed to escape the android was a heartfelt sigh.

Carefully, Hank reached up and pulled back the hood of Connor’s sweatshirt, revealing the gently whirling blue of his LED, as well as the rest of his face. He’d been a father more than long enough to recognize the feeling of a child falling asleep in his arms, but it was peculiar to experience it with an android, so he’d had to check. 

Without giving it a second thought, Hank pressed a brief kiss to the boy’s hair, then said, “Let’s go home.”

Connor barely stirred when Hank buckled him into the backseat and shut the door quietly after him, and he remained asleep the entire drive home, chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm. It was a strange thing to behold considering the lieutenant had only occasionally seen Connor sleep in the past. 

Shutting down for a couple of hours a night was generally recommended for androids to maintain peak system efficiency (just like shutting down a normal computer at night while it wasn’t in use), but otherwise it was simply used as a way to conserve power when they had nothing else to do. He’d never seen an android just… drift off the way Connor had in his arms, and Hank could only assume that it was some sort of setting specific to the YK line. They  _ had _ been designed to emulate a child’s habits as closely as possible with the goal of replacing an actual child in a family setting, after all.

Hank found his gaze inevitably darting to his rearview mirror every few moments the entire drive home, half to check on Connor, half to reassure himself that he hadn’t disappeared and this was all a dream after all. The android’s head lolled against the window, hiding his LED from sight with the exception of the blue faint glow it cast across the glass, and as Hank brought the car to a stop at a light, he allowed himself to examine Connor’s new face more closely.

After a moment’s study, Hank decided that while Connor looked startlingly similar to Cole at first glance, once you got over the initial shock their differences became more obvious. The android’s hair was lighter, for one, and with the heat on full blast in an attempt to warm the both of them up, it was starting to develop a bit of a curl. They had the same fair skin, though Connor had a dusting of freckles Cole never had, and his eyes seemed wider.

At the end of it all, though, they could easily have been brothers.

Stranger than the android’s similarities to his son, however, was the fact that Hank had never seen a YK like him before. There had been only a few out on the market before the revolution had put an end to android production, and he was fairly certain none of them had looked like Connor did now. Some sort of custom job, maybe? He still didn’t have any idea just how his partner had wound up in his this new body to begin with; something to ask once they’d gotten home and cleaned up.

Hank pulled the car into the driveway soon after, unbuckled his seatbelt, then turned in his seat to look at Connor, who was still out cold. The lieutenant hesitated for a long minute, torn between reaching out to wake the android and relishing just one more moment watching him out of fear that when he tried to touch him, he might disappear. Finally, he gave himself a mental shake, then let his hand drop to pat Connor’s knee, feeling inordinately relieved when his fingers met met not fog, but solid flesh. Or plastic, he supposed, but it was all the same to him in the end.

“Connor,” he said, voice gentle in a bid not to startle the android.

The boy startled into waking, a look of panic crossing his features as he looked around wild-eyed until he saw Hank, at which point he relaxed. “What happened?” Connor asked, combing his fingers absently through his hair.

“You fell asleep. We’re home,” Hank explained, a small, amused smile pulling at his lips as Connor’s brow furrowed in confusion.

“Fell asleep?” he asked, seeming baffled by the concept. “But I didn’t...”

“I think it’s part of the YK programming,” Hank reassured him. “They’re meant to replace human kids generally, so-”

“So their programming would need to be even more convincing than a standard service android’s,” Connor finished for him, his consternation fading somewhat as he realized his new system wasn’t flawed so much as it was built to a different purpose than his old one.

“Something like that,” Hank agreed. “Come on, let’s get inside before it starts raining again,” he said, then opened his door and climbed out.

Connor followed suit and glanced skyward as he closed the door behind him. It was after nine now, so the sky was dark regardless of the cloud cover, but thunder rolled in the distance, threatening a further wetting to anyone that lingered out of doors too long. 

The quiet jingling of Hank sorting through his keyring brought Connor’s attention back from the heavens and he hurried after the man. When he caught up to him at the stairs, a peculiar impulse to jump to the short distance from the ground up to the concrete porch overcame the android. Just as he was about to indulge, his conscious mind, mature as it was and unused to random flights of fancy, tried to check it, resulting in a jumble of commands that made him stumble and miss his footing altogether.

The android threw out his hands to catch himself as the corner of the porch rushed up to meet him, but stopped just as suddenly when a hand caught him above his elbow and hauled him upright again, just shy of disaster.

“The hell are you doin’?” Hank asked, seeming genuinely baffled as he sighed and stooped down, then hauled Connor up into his arms with a small grunt of effort.

“I can  _ walk, _ ” the android objected as his arms went automatically around Hank’s neck again, a frown on his small, pale face.

“ _ Can  _ you?” the lieutenant grumbled skeptically as climbed the steps and unlocked the door then pushed his way inside.

Connor huffed, but didn’t comment, embarrassed by his own awkward fumbling. Besides, he didn’t particularly mind being held by Hank; after the day he’d had, it was a comfort. He felt safe. The lieutenant had long had that effect on him though, he realized abruptly as Hank closed the door behind them and then locked it, it’d just taken nearly dying for him to recognize it.

Sumo barked from the kitchen and trotted towards them happily, making Connor truly smile for the first time since he’d found himself in his new body.

“Hey, Sumo,” Hank said, sounding tired as he put Connor down and watched with some amusement as the android eagerly approached the dog who sniffed him thoughtfully at first, then licked the boy’s face and pushed his face into his chest.

“He still likes me,” Connor said, clearly pleased by this development as he scratched the dog’s ears, then lost his small hands in the thick fur at the scruff of his neck.

Hank shrugged out of his coat and hung it on a hook and kicked off his mud covered shoes. “Sumo always has liked kids. Being made of plastic doesn’t make much difference to him, I guess,” the lieutenant remarked as Connor wrapped his arms around the dog’s neck and buried his face in his shoulder. Sumo, ever the patient creature, allowed him his moment before finally heaving a tremendous sigh and walking away, forcing the android to either let go, or be dragged along with him.

Connor opted for the former, though he watched the dog go a little wistfully before turning to look at Hank. A quiet, uncertain moment hung in the air between them, but before either dared to break it, an almost violent shiver rocked the android’s little body. The warmth of the car had gone some ways towards restoring his internal temperature and drying him out, but he’d still been out in the rain for hours, leaving him chilled right down to his biocomponents.

A concerned frown crossed Hank’s face and he said, “You’re a mess. Go take a hot shower and get warmed up. You can explain how you wound up pint sized at the graveyard when you’re done.”

Connor hesitated and frowned a little. “But-” he began, feeling reluctant to leave things unexplained for a moment longer after seeing how affected the man had been at his son’s gravesite.

“Go on,” Hank said, cuffing him affectionately and pushing him towards the hall. “You’re dripping mud and god knows what else all over the floor.”

The android glanced down, and while he was indeed doing just that, he was still skeptical about Hank’s professed concern for his floors. “Not like they’re particularly clean to begin with,” Connor muttered under his breath even as he turned to do as he was told.

“Well they don’t need the help either, smart ass,” Hank called after him with a snort, though he was smiling. Just before Connor closed the bathroom door, he added, “Throw your wet things out in the hall, I’ll wash ‘em!”

“Alright,” Connor replied, and after stripping down in the bathroom, did just that before closing the door and immediately making a beeline for the tub. He shivered a little as he turned on the faucet, then glanced down at his body while he waited for the water to warm. He was indeed quite dirty, though he could tell it wasn’t all his doing; some of the grime looked as though it had been there for some time.

It was a sad moment as Connor found himself wondering what sort of life his new body’s previous occupant had lead, and how they had been captured by traffickers. Had they been happy? Had they had a family, or were they alone in the world? The android sighed heavily and put the thoughts aside for the moment, fruitless as they were, then checked the water temperature and stepped in under the spray.

He lingered longer than he normally would, but he justified it by telling himself that his internal temperature had been on the low side, plus, you know, he had  _ died  _ earlier that day. Surely he deserved a few extra minutes in the shower. Hank stuck his head in and left him a fresh towel and one of his shirts to wear while Connor washed his hair, which the android made use of once he was warmed through by the water, and clean to boot. 

The t-shirt was soft, gray cotton with a detroit logo stamped on the front in faded black ink, and it swam on Connor like a nightgown. The android shrugged, figuring it was better than nothing until the things he’d arrived in where clean and dried, then turned his attention to the mirror over the sink with the intent of combing his hair.

When he’d wiped the glass clear of condensation, however, the face staring back at him was  _ not  _ the one he’d anticipated, and not just because he’d gone to work that morning in a different body.

Wide-eyed with shock, the LED on his brow flickering between yellow and red as he struggled to process what he was looking at, Connor lifted his hands to run them over his face. Cheeks, brow, nose, mouth… none of them were the same as before.

A knock at the door made Connor start and jerk around as Hank called, “You alright in there, Connor?”

“Yeah,” the android answered, then opened the door, his hair left uncombed in his distraction.

His discomfiture must have been obvious as Hank immediately frowned and asked, “What’s wrong?”

Connor looked up at him, his own brown furrowed as he debated on how to communicate his discovery before deciding to just come out and say it plain. “My face changed. This body’s face, I mean, obviously it’s not the same one I woke up in this morning,” he said with a sigh. “This body, before I took it, it looked completely different. Red hair, brown eyes-” he stopped when he realized that, rather than become more confused or alarmed, Hank’s expression had actually relaxed.

“Yeah, I had a suspicion,” he said, then offered Connor his phone. “Give that a read while I shower,” he said, then shooed the android out of the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

Connor blinked and examined the screen, which displayed a pre-revolution article proclaiming ‘New YK600 Revolutionizes the American Family!’ in bold text. Behind the door at his back, the android heard the shower start up again, and he wandered over to the sofa as he scrolled through the article.

It had been published just a week before the revolution and raved about all the features of the newest in the YK line by Cyberlife. Most pertinent to  _ his _ interests, however, was the ‘genetic customization’ feature that essentially allowed the YK600 to ‘imprint’ on its new human parents and take on their own physical traits so it actually  _ looked  _ like it could be their flesh and blood child. Not just hair and eye color, or skin tone… but their actual facial structures. The hardware behind it was vaunted as the most advanced to date out of cyberlife, but all Connor could think of was the look of naked fear on Hank’s face when he’d first confronted him in the graveyard.

He’d thought he’d just startled the man, a random pale child showing up in the rain… superstitious as humans could be, he’d assumed he’d understood. In retrospect, however, Connor realized that Hank’s reaction had been less because a child had confronted him, and more because a child that looked  _ uncannily like his own son _ had appeared to him in front of the same son’s grave.

Connor sighed and put Hank’s phone aside as he turned his gaze to the ceiling. A quick examination of his system details revealed that the detective’s theory had been correct; his new body wasn’t a YK500 at all, it was a YK600.

And apparently he’d imprinted on Hank.

The revelation wasn’t entirely surprising, though maybe a little embarrassing. The cat had been let out of the bag regarding the fact that he regarded Hank as a father figure, and he wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about that. Embarrassed, obviously, but mostly nervous. Hank hadn’t seemed upset or put off when he’d given him the article to read, but maybe after the initial relief of Connor’s still being among the living wore off, that would change. The lieutenant had referred to the android as ‘son’ on more than one occasion, not just earlier that evening, but how literally did he mean it? Considering he’d already had and lost one  _ actual  _ son, it could be that Connor’s pretentions as being a second might be distasteful to the man…

In an attempt to distract himself, Connor ran a brief system diagnostic and found that his new body’s thirium levels were quite low. Glad to have something to keep himself occupied for at least a minute, the android got up off the couch and headed into the kitchen, pausing to pat Sumo on the head along the way. 

Connor had been keeping an extra supply of blue blood at Hank’s house since the early days of their partnership, but as he stood barefoot on the linoleum and stared up at its lofty position on top of the refrigerator, it was his first time regretting not keeping it in the low cabinet the lieutenant had initially suggested.

Being small had so many disadvantages, the android thought, it was no wonder human children were always in such a rush to grow up, no matter how much their parents lamented the fact.

Ever a problem solver, Connor dragged one of the chairs from the kitchen table over to the refrigerator and climbed up onto the seat. He still wasn’t quite tall enough to reach the bottles where they stood at the back, so he put one foot up onto the counter in a bid for some extra height, fingers just brushing against his prize.

“‘The hell are you doing?” Hank asked, expression one of alarm as he rounded the corner into the kitchen from the hall. Connor turned and looked at him, frozen mid-reach as he started to answer, but before he could the chair on which he still had one foot began to slide treacherously out from under him. With more agility than the android thought he’d ever seen out of the man in the almost year he’d known him, Hank jumped forward and grabbed him one armed before he could even properly start to fall. “Jesus  _ Christ,  _ kid, you’re gonna break your damn neck!”

“Hank, I’m still much sturdier than a human despite being two feet shorter than I was yesterday,” Connor chided him.

The lieutenant looked discomfited by the statement, true thought it might have been. “Yeah, yeah,” he grumbled as he shifted his hold on Connor reflexively so the android straddled his right hip. “Says the guy that literally  _ died  _ earlier today.”

Connor opened his mouth to argue, but rethought the impulse, knowing it wasn’t an argument he’d ever be able to win, especially in Hank’s eyes. Instead, he pointed at the bottles of blue blood, still untouched on top of the refrigerator, and said, “My thirium levels are low.”

Rather than put Connor down, Hank reached up and snagged one of the bottles in question, then opened a cabinet and fetched down a mug. He put it down on the counter then proceeded to open the bottle of thirium one handed and poured the android an ample serving. An almost impressive dance ensued as Hank picked up the drink with his free hand, then hooked a foot around the leg of the chair Connor had nearly fallen from and pushed it back into place at the table, all while maintaining his hold on Connor himself. It had the feeling of something the man had done a thousand times before, though it was the android’s first time witnessing it, and he was left blinking as Hank plopped him down on the chair and placed the mug in front of him.

“All you had to do was ask,” the lieutenant remarked dryly, seeming oblivious to the oddness of what had just transpired.

Connor stared at the shimmering blue surface of the cup of thirium for a long moment as he debated the merits of commenting on Hank’s actions, but again decided against it. Instead, he picked up the mug two handed and took a long sip.

Hank didn’t give what he’d done a second thought until he was halfway through re-capping the bottle of blue blood, at which point he froze in place. God, he’d just grabbed Connor the way he used to do Cole whenever he’d climbed on the chairs despite how many times he’d damn well told him not to. Granted, he’d generally been going for the snack cabinet, but still…

The lieutenant glanced back towards Connor as he forced himself to finish screwing the bottle cap back on before returning it to the top of the refrigerator. As he watched, the android finished off his ‘drink’, tilting his head back to get everything he could out of the cup before placing it down on the kitchen table with a soft tap.

“Hey, Connor,” Hank began, feeling suddenly awkward. The sensation only increased as Connor looked around at him, silent question on his face. The lieutenant hesitated, uncertain of what he’d even been about to say. Should he apologize for treating the android like he was a child? Like he was his own son? That was weird, wasn’t it? He’d called Connor ‘son’ on more than one occasion and the android had never objected, but that didn’t mean he wanted anything to do with Hank as a father figure. For one, he was an android; did they even look for that kind of relationship with other people? For another, what would a person as competent, if sometimes socially naive, as Connor want with someone like Hank when it came to role models? He didn’t drink like he used to, but he was still a human garbage bag full of trauma and regret at the end of the day.

Better to keep his thoughts to himself and just pretend it hadn’t happened.

Hank ran his fingers through his tangled curls and jerked his thumb towards the living room. “Tell me what happened?”

Connor smiled and slid off his chair. “Okay,” he said, and followed the lieutenant into the living room.

The man dropped into his favorite spot on the left side of the sofa, then kicked his feet up onto the coffee table, though not before Connor squeezed past and took him off guard by settling next to him on the cushions. He’d expected the android to take the armchair like he usually did any time they weren’t watching television, but then, considering the topic of conversation, Hank couldn’t blame Connor for wanting to stick close.

The android sat straight on the couch at first, but frowned when his legs proved nowhere near long enough to touch the ground; in fact, his ankles barely cleared the edge of the cushion. With a sigh, he pulled his feet in so he sat cross-legged instead and tugged his oversized shirt down into a tent over his knees. Something soft settled around his shoulders and he looked around to see Hank dragging the blanket off the back of the couch to wrap around him.

“Thanks,” he said with a flash of a smile as he pulled it more firmly around him to ward off the chill in the air.

The corner of Hank’s mouth quirked up in answer and the man settled himself more comfortably in the corner of the couch before finally asking, “Alright, who do we need to kill?”

“ _ Arrest,  _ Hank. Arrest,” Connor said with a rueful smile that wasn’t unappreciative of his humor. “And I don’t know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, less of a cliffhanger ending this time at least, heh. Stay tuned to find out just what the heck the boys plan to do about this whole 'Connor is a baby and also his murderer's still out there somewhere' problem XD  
> Thanks for reading! Hope you guys enjoyed! If so, make sure to drop me a review and let me know what your favorite part was, I love hearing that from you guys!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Hope you guys enjoyed! If so, make sure to drop me a review and let me know what your favorite part was, I love hearing that from you guys!


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